


Gray

by nowhere_blake



Category: Third Watch
Genre: 9/11, F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, September 11 Attacks, absolutely no knowledge about Third Watch required tbh, but upsetting, makes complete sense even if you've never seen the show, nothing incredibly graphic, the research for this was not fun, there are some details included about the aftermath that are quite horrendous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 11:29:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13523316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowhere_blake/pseuds/nowhere_blake
Summary: The eleventh comes every year, and sometimes it's cold and windy, sometimes it's just as bright and warm as it was that day. Sometimes Faith is completely okay, but sometimes sheremembers, and sometimes people ask, and sometimes she thinks about all the things that she can never forget. Sometimes she thinks about seeing him there.For him it's about running and pitch-black, for him it's about hearing the rumble of the first plane go overhead in some one-night stand's apartment. For her it's about him.





	Gray

**Author's Note:**

> The TV show Third Watch told the lives of New York City police officers, firefighters and paramedics working on the so-called 'third watch', the 3pm to 11pm shift. The show started in 1999, they had no idea what was to come, how important their fictional characters' reactions to real-life events would become. The show dealt with September 11 in an incredibly meaningful and admirable way, first through a two-hour special of interviews ([part 1](https://vidzi.tv/6p15qxc22cfy.html) & [part 2](https://vidzi.tv/tq6h22ausxyi.html)) with real-life New York City first responders and their families, followed by an episode directly dealing with the day before, one about the harrowing days of the aftermath, and then even in later seasons, never forgetting about the events, never ignoring them.
> 
> I'm sure you can find many clips from the show online - let me just share the one; [it's not even been a year since that day, and after a handful of panic attacks and a fair amount of denial, Bosco finally breaks down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvPH6rhV3aI).
> 
> Here's what you need to know about our two main characters. Faith and Bosco are two New York City police officers, from the (fictional) 55th precinct, who have been partners for about nine years at this point. At first glance it's an unlikely pairing. Bosco is an 'act now and think later' kind of, aggressive and fairly arrogant guy in his early thirties, dedicated to catch bad guys by all means possible. Faith is a married mother of two, with the strongest New York accent and the most endearingly annoying laugh - she's the one you can count on to be reasonable, she's pristine with her paper-work, she's level-headed, clever and responsible. It might seem like, she's just there to keep him in check, but she can be just as reckless as Bosco, just as tough, just as aggressive. When it comes down to it, they are both good cops. They've been through a lot together, but they are partners and they always will be.
> 
> This is about the two of them, - because as much as this is Faith's story -, as everything else in her life, it all leads back to him in the end.
> 
> If you want to consider donating or getting involved, [9/11 Health Watch](http://www.911healthwatch.org/) takes care of survivors and first responders who are still suffering from illnesses and medical conditions caused mainly by breathing in the polluted air and dust on the day, and in the aftermath, during the cleaning up process. [Tuesday's Children](https://www.tuesdayschildren.org/) provides help and counselling for those affected by terrorism and traumatic loss.
> 
> You can find me [here](http://www.justrainythings.tumblr.com), if you feel like talking about this story, or anything else, really :)
> 
> (Also, I might have missed some words when it came to Americanising the spelling - I wanted to give Faith as much of an authentic voice as I could -, so please forgive me if you find some notoriously British things in there.)

Sometimes she wishes she never saw him there, wishes she could forget. Every so often she finds herself staring at a sign somewhere – in a bank, at work, stuck onto a fire truck –, a sign that says ‘ _never forget_ ’ and she feels like crying, she wants to scream, because she would give anything to be able to.

She very clearly remembers being sure that he was there too – not a rational or conscious thought, really, – just a feeling, a kind of intuition that came with being his partner, settling deeper and deeper into her bones with every passing minute. She could feel that he was there, she knew it with unquestionable certainty.

Despite that, she never really expected to find him, to stumble upon him by accident – never even had the time to think about it properly, to comprehend any of it at all – and maybe that’s her mistake, because it’s _them_ after all; they are partners, and they always find each other in the end, and she should have known, should have anticipated it. Maybe then she wouldn’t wish she could forget, maybe it wouldn’t have hurt that much, maybe now she wouldn’t feel like this.

It was so improbable though. So impossible. She knows the numbers, she knows how many people were there trying to help, she knows how many people died, she knows the names of [twenty-three people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_workers_killed_in_the_September_11_attacks#New_York_City_Police_Department) that used to wear the same uniform as her that won’t ever be able to anymore, _she knows the goddamn numbers_ , so she knows how unlikely it was for them to meet there.

But despite the chaos of it all, despite how unlikely it was in all the smoke and amongst all those people, they did find each other, before they were even assigned to anywhere, before there was even anyone officially down there from their precinct to tell them what to do, where to go.

And sometimes, god, _sometimes_ , she just wishes they never had, because even years later, staring at some sign somewhere with that date on it, she gets this jolt of pain low in her stomach, and she remembers that first moment she spotted him - only a shadow of what she felt that day, but still so agonizing.

The cloud of smoke is overwhelming when she first gets there. It doesn't feel real for a long while, like she’s underwater; it’s all numb, it’s raw nothingness.

She feels like the suffocating cloud in the air has come over all her senses too; everything seems muted, heavy and slow. Still, she’s going through the motions: pulling and pushing, _searching_ , looking for signs of life, shouting for help when a man collapses next to her in a fit of coughs, getting the words 'it's going to be okay' stuck in her throat. It’s all instinct though and nothing more, it’s conditioning, learned patterns and habits – it doesn't even feel like she's truly there, it doesn’t seem _real_ at all.

And while none of it is really conscious in her head at the time – every thought weighted and clouded with smoke and dust –, later, whenever she goes over it in her head, she can pinpoint these moments, these little flickers of time, that are sharper, that are clear and pointed, the ones that she knows she’ll remember as long as she lives, the ones she wants to forget the most.

At the beginning the reality of it only hits her in these moments, when suddenly the picture gets clearer, the noise gets louder, the screams and shouts get closer. She notices a car buried in debris and with its windows missing that still has the headlights on. A firefighter walks by, face covered in layers and layers of dust, save for the visible tear-tracks down his cheeks. She sees someone stumble over a large chunk of metal that is clearly identifiable as something that used to be a part of a plane. She realizes she has a cut on her arm that is bleeding, but she can’t feel the pain. She spots a familiar face, the first person she actually knows.

It’s a bit like coming up for air after being submerged, every time, suddenly it all becomes overwhelming and unforgivingly tangible.

The person she recognizes is a guy who was a couple of years above them at the academy – just a casual acquaintance –, and she can't even remember his name, has no idea of his rank or which precinct, but it's the first face she sees that she knows, and that one hits her more sharply than the ones before – she almost falls down from the force of it. This is real. This is actually happening.

She stops by the guy, grabs the other end of the steel panel he's trying to move without a word. They work together for a while, half an hour maybe, moving around, carding though debris, desperate to find someone, _anyone_. She’s not sure if he recognizes her too, or the silent camaraderie on his face is because of the NYPD badge she has around her neck, but it doesn’t really matter either way. They get separated after a while: she's trying to talk down this boy, not older than twenty-five, from going into one of the unstable buildings (she thinks it's Building 7 or maybe the Verizon one, but it's hard to tell) after his fiancé, and the guy from the academy disappears, moving on to help someone else. She never goes out of her way to find out whether he lived or died, stayed a cop or quit, if he breathed in enough dust to get lung cancer.

The sharpness of the image disappears with him, it all becomes numb and muted again – the air is too heavy to even think clearly.

There is a torn brief-case on the ground that has an untouched cellophane-wrapped sandwich resting in it. She looks up and realizes that the pile is level with nearby buildings’ windows, that the rubble is easily matching the height of the building she works in. Amongst all the sirens, she hears a woman shouting ‘Emily!’ somewhere behind her, out on the street, and she shudders, stops for a moment, realizes that she’s crying.

These sharp and focused moments start to build up after a while, coming together, like a big horrible puzzle, where everything is blurry and numb except for the pieces in the middle, pieces that she's desperately trying to fit and link together over and over again, but can’t, even though they clearly belong.

It all shatters when she first sees him though.

Maybe it's more like broken glass than a puzzle picture then, and it's all fogged over, except for the edges, for the sharp bleeding cuts that they cause, for the orange fires that burn viciously all around them.

It all collapses. It burns. It breaks down. She sees him and she knows it's real, she knows that it's really happened. She sees him and it's pain, sharp and unbearable. She sees him and it’s like a moment of a hard blow, when she can't breathe, but it's just that one second of the impact over and over again, repeating itself, and there’s no time for her to gain back her balance and straighten up, to get air into her lungs, so she can breathe again.

Looking back on it, maybe she always knew she would find him (that they would find each other, because they are _partners_ ), just like she always knew that he was there, from the moment she started running, the moment she got out of the subway. She was sure that he was running too, towards the very same thing she was, she knew that she would find him there. She knew it the same way she knew that he was always going to be there right next to her every single time she was chasing a perp, or that he would be standing right behind her, covering her, every time she drew her gun before opening a door.

She doesn't know why, but she expects him to be wearing his uniform. It's strange, because she never has a conscious thought about it, about him being there in the first place, let alone what he’s wearing. It’s just a feeling, an emotion, and she never imagines it, and it's not even logical given the time of day, but for some reason, she thought he'd be in uniform. Dark navy torn and dirty, almost white from the dust.

He is not though, he's in civilian, jeans and a T-shirt under an NYPD vest that she knows doesn't belong to him. It takes her a minute to realize what the amounts of gray dust on his clothes mean, the layers of dirt in his hair, the crust of dried blood on his arms. He got here much earlier than she did. He got here before it... _Before_.

She doesn't feel relief that he's survived it coming down, that he's okay, because she never knew him to be in danger. Instead it's just an empty pang, a numbness in her stomach, a sinking feeling, a desire to just give up.

Because it's all gray. The dust and the smoke, the eerie quiet in some places that is replaced by blaring sirens in others, the steel, the metal, the paper on the ground, the photos of smiling families and loved ones that only a few hours ago stood on desks, even the beeping, the constant beeping sound of firemen's abandoned masks and air tanks buried underneath them, even that is gray, everything is _gray gray gray_ and him- he’s gray too.

And that can’t be right, because Bosco is all color, bright and intense: the unyielding navy blue of his uniform, the black of his coffee, the vivid brown-green marble of his eyes. And he’s all color on the inside as well: the deep purple of his passion, the warming orange of his laugh, the crimson of his anger, the calm green of his solid presence, whenever she needs him, always always there, but-

He’s gray.

He’s gray all over, he’s coughing as he cards through the rubble, and his face is clean, recently washed with water from a labelled plastic bottle handed out by a silently crying EMT, but everything else is gray about him, the dust on his clothes, on his skin, in his hair, the way his shoulders tense up in determination, that’s gray too, and his _eyes_ …

 _His eyes are_ so _gray._ They are stony, silent and bleeding grief, like an unforgiving winter day, and for the very first time in her life she wants to call him Maurice.

And in all the grayness, suddenly she can hear the plane, suddenly she can hear the bodies meeting the ground, suddenly she feels like she was there too, that she too had to run from the vicious cloud, that just like him, she got here _before_ , and it’s all gray and… she’s falling.

She’s not sure she ever stops falling after that day, and she sometimes still has this sickly urge to ask him if he’ll be there to catch her, but she figures he has worse demons to deal with, worse memories to keep buried. She doesn’t want to bother him, not with this. She knows that in this case, he needs her to be the strong one, the one he can count on, so she just leaves it be, falls silently and without showing her tears.

She gets good at hiding it – maybe unhealthily so –, and after a few years, it’s not as painful anymore, the feeling not as desperate. It slows down, seems far away. She sees a picture of the New York skyline on an office wall and she walks past it. Someone mentions a friend who died there and she offers her condolences. She wakes up on the eleventh, there are films on the TV, articles in the papers, and it’s just a memory, something from the past. She sees a fire truck, reads ‘ _never forget_ ’ and it’s fine, really, it's _fine_ , she doesn’t want to.

People talk about it all the time, and it’s completely okay. (Not the people it actually happened to - although, she thinks vaguely, maybe that day really just happened to _all of us_  -, not the people that were there and survived, not the people who were there to help. Because the people who were there don’t have that privilege; mentioning it in passing, casually, like it’s something abstract and intangible. Not them, but other people.) People who were going to the dry-cleaners and stopped in front of a shop-window's televisions. People who were about to leave for work when the phone started ringing. People who were at a funeral, a meeting, a doctor’s appointment.

And they all talk about themselves, recalling where they were and what they were doing, and they always mention things that are personal, things that relate to them, things that fit into their everyday lives – and maybe that’s how they try to make sense of it all, maybe that’s how they deal with it.

People talk about it all the time, and she’s fine, but then _sometimes_ … she’s not.

Because sometimes- She’s not sure why some moments are different than others, if there’s any explanation to it at all, but _sometimes_ she can still feel herself falling, knows she never stopped at all. Sometimes she just wants to forget, because she can feel herself shattering, collapsing, burning and coming down again, just like a building, like a _tower_ (maybe not one, but two).

People talk about it all the time and it’s fine, but sometimes, if she’s in uniform, people notice the shiny little black bar on her chest, over her heart, and they glance at those three letters, a W, a T and a C, and they go quiet for a moment. And then when they finally ask, she doesn’t think about herself, her doctor’s appointment, the subway, or running, or the chaos, the smoke and the dust. She doesn’t think about any of those picture-perfect memories, those sharp and horrifying moments, those puzzle pieces that she will never be able to forget.

When someone asks her, she thinks about him. She thinks about how gray he was when she first saw him there, and how when he broke down in her living room months and months later, every word that left his lips, every one of his teardrops that stained her shirt were tinted with the same shade of gray that he was that day – polluted and corrupt, heavy and unspeakable.

She’s never sure what to say, what people expect of her when they ask; whether it’s curiosity or grief she needs to relieve and satisfy. She always says the same thing though, even if she knows that it’s not the right thing to say, that the wording is not, and never will be right.

She tells them it was gray, and people think she means the smoke, the ash, the dust, the pile, the concrete. But she thinks of him, she means _him and his eyes_ , she thinks about the grayness that sometimes, on bad days, she can still see lurking in them, she thinks about how broken he was, how he’ll never be the same again, and sometimes, _sometimes_ she wishes with all her might that she could forget, wishes to never have seen him there at all.


End file.
